The keyboard player in Pink Floyd died yesterday from cancer, aged 65. The Mojo obit is here. Most of us would have seen him last at Live 8, when the briefly reunited band topped the bill. Wright was the unsung hero of the band. He was not the main songwriter (Roger Waters) nor the rock-god soloist (David Gilmour). Instead, he was the musical heart if not soul of the band. He provided the textures underpinning the solos; his was the plaintive, fragile voice in harmony with Gilmour’s; his keyboards were the essential harmony with Gilmour's guitar; he provided the complex jazz-inflected chord structures; and more times than you might think his were the songs you remember.

He wrote Dark Side of the Moon’s “Great Gig in the Sky”, seen here in the Pulse version with Sam Brown, Claudia Fontaine and Durga McBroom:



Nice to see him with a decent bass player – Guy Pratt, his son-in-law, a stand-up comic (find him on YouTube) and author of a very amusing book about life on the road, My Bass and Other Animals.

On Pink Floyd’s last album, The Division Bell, Wright wrote the music for the lovely “Wearing the Inside Out” (the words by his friend Anthony Moore, are said to be about him):



His first solo album Wet Dream is pretty dull, but 1996’s Broken China is terrific, the great lost Floyd album: it really shows how much he contributed to their sound. (It is no coincidence that The Final Cut, the only album he didn’t play on, is unlistenable.) It is a (very accurate - trust me) song cycle about what it’s like to be in a relationship with a depressive, as apparently he was at the time. The highlight is “Breakthrough”, sung by Sinead O’Connor. There are no clips of her performance, sadly, but here's the sound, followed by a clip of Gilmour soloing in concert with (invisible, as usual) Wright:





For an Englishman Wright could, like Gilmour, be dead funky, as seen here in “Funky Dung” from Atom Heart Mother:



And another thing – he ended up looking like that other elegantly melancholy Englishman, John le Mesurier.